Monday, 15 April 2013

My views on the Thatcher issue

Yesterday I had to sit and listen to a debate about the cost of Margaret Thatcher's funeral and the proposal of a minute's silence for her around football grounds and I chose to stay quiet. The debate was frustrating me so much I chose to stay quiet and not get involved in some out the outrageous comparisons made, including a soldier who died fighting for his country.

So I'm going to give my views on those subjects. Firstly, the proposal of a minute's silence at football grounds. Now, I'm 20 years old, so I didn't live in the period that Thatcher was prime- minister and I'm sure she did some good things to stay as PM for 11 years, but she also did some awful things too.

I'm not writing this to slate the woman, but she was the head of the country at the time of the Hillsborough disaster and there wasn't a proper investigation into the disaster until 22 years after her reign as prime- minister ended. How she slept at night for the last few months knowing one of the biggest injustices of all time happened under her watch, her rule and her corrupt police force is beyond me. She branded football supporters as hooligans and treated them all like scum. I've spoken to an Everton fan on the subject on Twitter who said:

"I was going to football in the '80s and we [football fans] were treated like 3rd class citizens. You really had
to bite your tongue, coppers were brutal"

The buck has to stop with her on this. The fact that she oppressed football fans so unfairly and handled the Hillsborough disaster so pathetically means that she didn't in one slice deserve a minute's silence at any football ground today, or ever. She was the enemy to football, why should football pay it's respects to someone who didn't pay respect to it? And caused so many families to live with the injustice of their dead relatives wrongly recieving the blame for their own deaths and being branded 'hooligans'.

I certainly wouldn't have taken part in any silence dedicated to her at the football. It'd be wrong. If she hadn't have done what she did to football and indirectly caused such grief and injustice to so many families for so many years after the Hillsborough disaster then I would have. But her role in that was inexcuseable. We've had minute's silences for soldiers and victims of bombings in the past at Everton and rightly so.

To compare Thatcher to that was nothing short of disgraceful.

And on the funeral that's just as, if not more, ridiculous. To spend £10 million on a funeral of anyone is staggeringly disgraceful and completely unjustified. How can you justify it? Her service to the country? Balls to that, she got paid for those services to the country at the time- that was her reward for that, and let's not forget all the stuff discussed in the previous few paragraphs.

That £10 million could be spent in a much worthier way. Improving health care, helping the many homeless people in the country, going towards cancer research, helping the ill, improving housing, I could name loads of things that would make the spending of that money much less of a waste. How can you even spend £10 million on a funeral anyway? Have they booked some magicians, parachuters and various music bands or something?

It's the craziest way to spend money I've ever heard of. Yes the likes of footballers get paid too much but that doesn't make this right. That's like saying 'well that money gets spent wrongly so why not spend this wrongly as well?' Plus, so much money is spent on football because it's chosen by millions of people, it's chosen by the public. Thatcher's funeral hasn't been. It's been chosen by a few muppets in the government who must live in a bubble far from the reality of 99% of the British public.

How many people are struggling financially in this country? How many jobs are underpaid? Yet instead of sorting out that they decide to spend it on an oppressive, conscienceless prime- minister's funeral. It's an outrageous way to spend such a vast amount of money.